Markdown Here

I’m a member of the
Ruby Rogues Parley group. When it
was a Google Groups mailing list (it’s now a
Discourse forum),
Chris Hunt
responded to a post with a really nicely formatted message that had
beautifully-styled code snippets. When asked how he did that, he
pointed to Markdown Here.

I’m becoming a big fan of Markdown. It’s not perfect, but the more I
use it, the more I like it for a lot of my writing. I use Octopress
for this blog so I write these posts in Markdown. And of course,
GitHub uses Markdown a lot as well. So I was immediately intrigued
and went to investigate.

Markdown Here (MDH, for short) by
Adam Pritchard is an extension for
Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Thunderbird, and Postbox that lets you write
e-mail using GitHub-flavored Markdown and then convert it into rich
text (HTML). It works for e-mail, Google Groups, the Evernote and
Wordpress web interfaces, and many other places that support rich
editing.

MDH supports code snippets and math formulae as well, which
makes it really nice when participating in technical discussions.

You can customize the styling used by MDH, so you can make your
messages look however you want.

I’ve found that MDH is quite good at round-tripping my rich text.
I’ll write something, convert to HTML to see how it looks, and then
convert back to Markdown to keep writing. This workflow works pretty
well.

I don’t use MDH for everything, because I normally prefer plain text
for e-mail and other written communication. But when I need
formatting, code snippets, tables, or other rich text, MDH is my go-to
choice. Apparently,
I’m not the only one.